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Before we get into why you may need a Life Coach, let’s take a minute to explain what a Life Coach is!

Athletes have coaches. Many entrepreneurs and professionals have mentors. In many ways they really are the same thing.

A life coach is a coach for your life. Most of us weren’t formally taught how to live successfully. A life coach can help you to figure out what you want to do with your life, set goals, and achieve them. They have experience and training in helping others to live fulfilling lives.

So what’s the difference between a Life Coach and a therapist or a consultant?

A life coach is not a therapist. Therapists deal with past issues and traumas. Life coaches work from the present moment and into the future. A life coach won’t help you get over a past loss or deal with the fact that you were bullied in junior high. A life coach can guide you toward building a more desirable future. A coach is not meant to replace professional counseling for more serious mental health needs.

Consulting and coaching can overlap if that is the nature of your relationship with your coach. While true coaching (according to the ICF) is never offering advice or opinions, consulting does contain an element of the client receiving some direction from the coach’s personal knowledge and/or experience..

You may hire a coach who specializes in a skill so they can help you define your own goals while also sharing their experience to help you. Often you see this in business and health coaching, or what you would traditionally think of when you think of an athletic coach. If you are in the work place working with a director who is coaching you, they will potentially have input as to how you move forward in a situation and therefore blend coaching and consulting.

In health coaching, it’s often very far from the true ICF coaching model. When the coach is giving you workouts, menus, and more it falls more in the genre of consulting than true coaching. This is not right nor wrong, but there is a distinction between the two.

The coaching industry is unregulated. Anyone can say they are a coach, which is why I think it’s imperative to ask the person you are thinking of working with if they have any formal training. This doesn’t have to be an ICF accredited training, but it helps. For example, if you hire someone who has done the same thing you want to achieve they don’t necessarily need to be a credentialed coach. But it does help! Just because someone has done it themselves doesn’t always mean they are are skilled at helping someone else do it. And the contrary is also true, just because someone hasn’t done it, doesn’t mean they can’t help give you the tools to accomplish it for yourself.

So now that it’s a little more clear on what a Life Coach is, here are 7 reasons why you may need one:

You have a goal and just can’t seem to make it happen.

Limiting beliefs sabotage your ability to move forward in certain areas of your life. (Often our limiting beliefs are completely in our subconscious which is why it’s so important to work on our thoughts and expose what is actually driving our decisions and behaviors.)

You know you need some guidance beyond yourself to push to the next level. (You need clarity and are feeling stuck.)

You feel overwhelmed by all that is going on in life but don’t know what to change. (Or don’t know when to say yes or no to things.)

You don’t even know where to start as to what goals you want to achieve.

You get easily distracted and waste time. (Priorities and time management! Boundaries come in to play here as well.)

You need space outside of your own head to sort through what you are thinking.

There is no reason you have to figure everything out on your own. We hire personal trainers, coaches for our children, and yet when it comes to someone helping us figure out quite possibly the most important thing (our own health, sanity, life) we often feel the need to just figure it out on our own.

It’s often the most successful people that have the biggest team supporting them, even if you don’t see it. We must know what we don’t know, and take the time assure that what do consciously know we are choosing to act on. Ideally, as you work with your coach, the tools they use to help you will become second nature and you will begin to see yourself coaching yourself with those same tools. The results from the time you spend with your coach begins to compound as you begin to apply them to other areas of your life.

If you are looking for a coach and would like to start the conversation as to what it could look like for us to work together click here.

Fully Engaged Mom

Sarah Failla: Life Coach + Health/Weight Loss Coach

I help busy moms design a life they love living.

Hey! I’m Sarah! I am a Life Coach for busy moms. I help moms find freedom and confidence to do life and motherhood their way and in a way that works for their family based on the season of life they are in. No mom guilt, no comparison. Better boundaries, happiness, success, and a more sane YOU. More about me here…

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